BIG WEST ADDS BOISE STATE, TO SAN DIEGO STATE’S GREAT RELIEF

The Big West Conference made it official Friday and added Boise State in most sports except football, starting with the 2013-14 season.

What does that mean for San Diego State?

SDSU officials have danced around the issue for months, declining to speculate what dominoes might fall if Boise State didn’t find a home for its other sports — whether that would torpedo their plan to join the Big East in football without a western partner, whether that would mean crawling back to the Mountain West, hat in hand, tail between legs.

But they don’t have to say it. Boise State President Bob Kustra did.

“If we had not made the decision we made,” Kustra told the Idaho Statesman recently, “San Diego State, according to (the Big West), would not have been able to hang in there. And the Big West couldn’t handle that. They couldn’t lose San Diego State.”

Friday’s announcement, then, relegates that possibility to the dustbin of what-ifs. Boise State is all in — Big East in football, Big West in men’s basketball and most everything else. So, now, is SDSU.

Or as Aztecs Athletic Director Jim Sterk put it: “We were very active making sure this kept moving forward in a positive way.”

Several Big West sources said there was initial resistance to adding the Broncos to the stable. This is a conference that, until last month, consisted of nine schools all in California, seven in the southern half of the state. Hawaii formally joined in July, and SDSU was set to join next summer.

“A bus conference,” Boise State’s Kustra called it.

“They had a strategic plan,” Sterk said. “Boise State was outside that footprint, so they had to reassess the positives of bringing Boise into the league.”

The Western Athletic Conference had tried a similar model, stretching across multiple time zones and racking up the frequent flier miles, and it ultimately disintegrated, which is the reason Boise State was looking for a home for its non-football sports in the first place. And maybe in an ideal world the Big West would pass on the Broncos.

But the politics became so intricately intertwined with the Big East’s western expansion in football that the Big West risked losing its most lucrative prize if it said no. The vote earlier this week among university presidents, Big West Commissioner Dennis Farrell said, was unanimous.

“SDSU is a huge catch for us,” said Farrell, himself an SDSU alum. “We wanted to make sure their future was secure with the Big East conference. We don’t know for sure what would have happened if Boise State couldn’t find a home for their other sports and had to go back to the Mountain West, and whether the Big East would maintain its commitment with SDSU or not.

“But this was within our control, dealing with Boise State. If we had decided not to move in that direction, then SDSU’s future might not have been in our control, and you don’t like to be in that situation.”